Goethe C2 - reviewing my exam mistakes

Something I didn't know before I did the exam is that after failing 2 parts of the Goethe C2 exam (hey, and passing 2 parts!), I was offered the opportunity to head into the Goethe Institut Sydney to review my paper and see where I had gone wrong. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to bring the papers home with me, nor to take photos or copies, and I couldn't see the questions again (this may have been due to them not being available rather than specifically restricted, I'm not sure), but the exam supervisor did discuss the paper with me and explain the examiners' (plural - there were two markers for the written section of the exam, as well as for the spoken section) comments, which was extremely helpful. I don't remember where I went wrong in great detail, but my general impression is that I scored reasonably in those sections to do with "covering all the questions" and perhaps the overall structure and content, but I fell down in vocabulary and, particularly, an area which I believe was called "structure" but basically meant sentence-level grammatical mistakes. There was another area that covered grammar too which also wasn't great, but only one of them got me a "1". If that had been a 2 I would have passed. After all, I only missed out on a bare pass by 2 marks. This sort of grammatical polish and precision is something that can be improved by constant, careful practice and using the language often and extensively, being careful to observe the differences between one's own speech and that of one's interlocutors. Having said that, my impression from reading through many of my mistakes is that I could also have done better in this area just by having enough time to proofread and edit my answer. I write extremely slowly so I only just have enough time to write the 350 or so words required and certainly don't have time to write a rough copy, edit it and then copy it up neatly into the answer paper as many other much more successful C2 participants seem to have reported. However, I am pretty sure that I wrote more than required and I certainly could have forced myself to finish with at least 5 minutes to spare, if not 10. TO make use of this I would need to write my essay with a blank line between each written line to ensure I had space to effect neat corrections, which I also didn't do. So, yeah, this will need to be my strategy on the day. The other area I failed, I completely bombed out in - the listening section. I only got 37! In my single practice session with an official practice paper I got 87 and so didn't do any more practice. So, after the exam, in order to prepare for my re-attempt next year, I tried another official practice paper and got 79! Pretty similar to my first practice, very different to my exam result. I'm not sure what to put this down to. The two factors I can think of are (1) I listen with headphones which increases the clarity of the sound (although on the day I didn't feel this was an issue) and (2) my eyesight is getting worse and on the day of the exam, after having got through the 70 minute reading section of the exam, my eyes were very tired and I remember really struggling to focus on the words for the listening quetions sometimes. I always find the hardest part of the listening test, even in practice, to be just reading the digesting the questions and possible answers fast enough because we don't really get much reading time and I am a slow reader even in English, and naturally even more so in German. So, yeah, I think this was probably a bigger issue on the day. I distinctly remember struggling to read the questions and then not really being sure what the written word was asking, even though I heard the audio very clearly. Listening to genuine, native level content is the thing I do most with my German and I do a fair amount of it. I generally feel like I understand 100%, so the audio itself probably wasn't the issue. I will need to continue practicing, but also I expect that this section will just go better on the day because I won't be doing the reading section again, thus saving my eyes for the listening section. I will still practice this section of course. As for practicing the written section, I will need to pump more essays out with a time limit to get my handwriting speed up, but I also need corrections. The path I was originally going to follow was to use an Italki teacher and/or free writing correction websites to get corrections and use them to improve my writing iteratively. I will likely still be using these avenues, but since the release of ChatGPT I've realised that there's an amazingly powerful tool for free (or near free - they charge USD0.04 per ONE THOUSAND WORDS for their most expensive model. You can ask it to write an essay for you, as well as use it to improve your own writing and to explain the corrections, line-by-line if necessary. It's not perfect but it is good enough to help me improve. Truly worldchanging stuff for language learners that I'll be writing about soon I hope. I'll still be making use of humans, just likely less often, saving time (ChatGPT's feedback is practically instant) and money. In a few months when I plan to retake the Goethe C2 exam (listening and writing sections only) I'll be able to report on how it worked out.